Florida teen smokers hit record low, study says

The rate of high schoolers who smoke in Florida dropped to 8.6 percent in 2013, far below the national average for high schoolers, which is 15.8 percent, says a new national report released Monday.

"We frequently hold Florida up as a model," said Peter Hamm, spokesman for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, in Washington. "It pioneered one of the most effective campaigns ever to keep kids from smoking."

As a result, the state can boast "one of lowest high-school smoking rates ever recorded," Hamm said. Florida has cut its high school smoking rate by almost half since 2005, when 15.7 percent of high schoolers smoked.

Despite that success, the state spends less than a third of what the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says it should to keep residents from lighting up.

The state spent 4.2 percent of the $1.6 billion it collected last year from the 1998 tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, said the report. The CDC recommends states dedicate 13 percent of those funds to prevention programs. Only two states – Alaska and North Dakota – do that.

But Florida is doing better than most states, said Hamm. The state ranks 15th in funding tobacco prevention programs, according to the state-by-state report by the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, the American Heart Association, the American Cancer Society and others in the public health coalition.

The 15-year-old tobacco settlement occurred when states sued the tobacco industry for causing states to incur medical bills for tobacco-related illnesses. Florida spends $66 million a year on tobacco prevention and cessation. Meanwhile, tobacco companies spend nine times more, or $563 million a year, to market their products in Florida.

Nationally, states receive $25 billion from the settlement and tobacco taxes, but spend just under 2 percent of that – $481 million – on tobacco prevention, according to the study.

Rather than traditional campaigns that tell kids not to smoke because it's bad for their health, the state in launched a much more effective campaign, Hamm said.

"The campaign told kids that the reason they were thinking about smoking was because the tobacco industry was targeting them, because the companies needed kids to start smoking now to replace all the customers they were losing who were dying from smoking," he said.

"By telling kids that adults were up to no good and were misleading them so the companies could profit, Florida hit a home run," Hamm said

Tobacco use is the No. 1 cause of preventable death in the U.S., killing more than 400,000 Americans and costing $96 billion in health-care bills each year. In Florida, tobacco annually claims 28,600 lives and costs $6.3 billion in health-care bills, said the report.